The shocking truth about the 'ordinary' killer Nazi

In an infamous picture from the Second World War, an SS soldier blithely prepares to shoot a Jewish prisoner. The murderer's identity has finally been revealed and shows what can happen when we lose our humanity, writes Guy Walters

- Guy Walters

A bespectacled and serious-looking young man is pictured standing, pistol in his right hand, pointing directly at the head of a Jewish man he is about to murder. He is photographed perched on the edge of a pit filled with corpses in the grounds of a fortress in the middle of Ukraine on 28 July 1941. Commonly known as “The Last Jew in Vinnitsa”, the image has become as iconic of the genocide as the entrance to Birkenau, or the piles of bodies being bulldozed at Belsen.

After decades of scholarly research and investigation, we now know the man’s name was Jakobus Onnen. He was a teacher of French and English mainly, as well as physical education. Brought up in a small village near the German border with the Netherlands, his father, also a teacher, had died around the time Jakobus turned 18, in 1924. Had it not been for the war, Onnen, who was bright and studious, would have fitted well into the faculty of the German Colonial School near Kassel in central Germany, where he taught from 1932 to 1939.

What makes the photograph of Onnen so remarkable is not only the seeming impassivity of the young uniformed men as they watch him murder, but also the haunted and eerily calm expression on the hollow face of the man who is seconds away from becoming another corpse. So much of the photograph suggests routine, another day at work. There is nobody screaming, nobody crying, nobody flinching or turning away. The madness is in the sense of stillness. You can almost hear the shot echo around the courtyard of the fortress, and then the quiet thud of the body as it lands in the pit. And then perhaps the word “next”.